'Tam o' Shanter' - Storytelling and antiquarianism

This chapter defends the joyful unseriousness of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ against those who see it as a troubled precursor to later Romantic modes of verse. It describes the origins of the poem in Burns’s collaboration with the antiquarian Francis Grose. It explicates the poem’s deployment of apostrophe as both a reflection of Burns’s experience of addressing socially diverse audiences and the narrator’s way of putting ironic distance between himself and the poem’s ostensible moral judgements. While acknowledging the contexts of oral performance that inform the poem, to which it alludes and in which it is still enjoyed, this chapter argues for understanding ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ in terms of its Augustan literary pedigree, and in particular its use of the hudibrastic verse form, with Thomas Holcroft’s Human Happiness (1783) providing a useful point of comparison.